This invention relates in general to framed screens intended for use in the windows and doors of people's homes to exclude crawling or flying insects, bugs and the like. In normal use the screening material, which typically may be made of thin strands of metal, plastic, or glass fibers, for example, and which is fragile, is easily damaged or detached from its frame, and when this happens the screening function is lost. For aesthetic reasons, including architectural beauty as well as maximum ventilation capability, it is desirable to make the frames of screens as thin as possible, and to maximize the area of window or door opening that is covered only by the screen material. This is especially true when sliding glass doors are installed in a home, and a sliding screen door is fitted to the opening for use when a door is left opened. The opportunity to poke a sharp object through the screen, or even for a person to walk through it, is sharply enhanced in that type of installation. The presence of little children or animal pets in a household further increases the opportunities to damage or destroy a screen, since children and animals do not reach for doorknobs--they almost always push on the nearest part of the door, and if it is the screen, damage easily results.
The almost universally-accepted form of frame-and-screen structure that is in use at the present time is a frame having a groove or channel along one edge for receiving and retaining the screen and a spline which holds the screen peripherally in the groove. In a typical screen installation, the screen is forced into the groove to form a mating channel for the spline, and then the spline is forced into place in the channel. This structure requires no tacks, and lends itself easily to stretching the screen across the frame opening. Professional screen installers, using wheel-type screen and spline installation tools can do neat installations fairly quickly with this kind of frame structure. This is illustrated in FIGS. 1 and 2 of the accompanying drawings, to be described below.
For the home owner, kits of screen material cut to convenient small sizes for standard window and door openings, and a supply of spline material, are available through convenient retail outlets, such as home-improvement and do-it-yourself stores, variety stores, drug stores, supermarkets and discount stores. Such kits, which are sold under brand names of the manufacturers who assemble and package them, are an economically sound response to the problems of screen maintenance and repair that confront the average home owner or occupant. Thus, a kit of screen parts and spline material suitable for replacing the screening in the frame of a window screen, may sell at retail for as little as $1.95. When one considers that under current economic conditions it will cost approximately $10.00 or more per hour for the services of a skilled tradesperson, including travelling time if necessary, the average householder is on practical economic grounds virtually compelled to maintain and repair screens on a do-it-yourself basis. However, a frustrating difficulty, to which up to now no manufacturer of do-it-yourself screen repair and replacement kits has provided a solution, is the fact that wheel-type screen and spline installation tools intended for non-professional use by householder-consumers are priced at retail in a range from about $1.50 each to about $10.00 each. This is too much to pay for a tool that may be used only once, or at most a few times. It is economically unsound to put the consumer in a position to have to pay as much or more for a tool to install a replacement screen, as the price of a kit of replacement screen materials.